17 January 2012 8:01 AM

MAKING sure that the breakdowns that happened to Paula Radcliffe at the last two Olympic Games do not happen to Britain’s Olympic athletes this year is Dan Pfaff’s job.

Radcliffe, remember, stayed out of the loop of official medical screening and got herself in trouble. Pfaff’s team makes sure that does not happen for London to any athlete.

“World class athletes are like Formula 1 cars. They need a good pit crew analysing them because if they don’t come in on the right lap the machine breaks down,” said Pfaff, an American bio-mechanist employed by UK Athletics.

Take Radcliffe’s marathon team-mate Mara Yamauchi. Her bodily machine broke down catastrophically last January. Getting her back on the road has been down to Pfaff and his two therapists at London’s Lee Valley Athletic Centre, a short distance from the Olympic Stadium. Keeping her on it is their next trick.

Last May, after five weeks unable to run a step and five months doing alternative training in an effort to rehabilitate a chronic hamstring problem, Yamauchi’s Olympic dream was in tatters.

Some doctors were advising surgery, a potential kiss of death to her running in London. “It would have meant a race against time to be ready to run a qualifying race next spring and probably not having sufficient time afterwards to recover for the Olympics,” Mara admitted to me.

Pfaff’s team was the alternative, and their treatment worked so spectacularly that Yamauchi last month joined Radcliffe as the first women selected by the British Olympic Association after running the qualifying time with nearly four minutes to spare. “A pretty amazing achievement,” says Pfaff of Yamauchi’s selection.

In Yamauchi’s words, they “taught me to run naturally again”. Pfaff, who coached Donovan Bailey to the Olympic 100 metres gold in 1996 and has been a bio-mechanist for 38 years, analysed the cause by studying her action on cutting edge 300-frame a second recordings.

He decided that at the same age as Radcliffe, Yamauchi had the classic ageing endurance runner’s problem of a body contorted by its endless efforts to save energy into what he calls “dysfunctional patterns”. They diagnosed faulty shoulder action, problems with both hips and one very badly placed foot.

“I made no promises but asked her to give us four weeks,” he said, and then set about taking her back to basics. Within four weeks she was running again.

“What he had me doing wasn’t difficult but I was constantly having to think about things I hadn’t thought of before, about how I ran. I’m not 100 per cent, probably won’t ever be again because it’s built up over the course of my career and at my age there’s bound to be wear and tear, but there’s minimal discomfort now.” said Yamauchi, a diplomat on unpaid leave from the Foreign Office.

“Most athletes end up this way. You only have so many marathons in you. Very few end up with bodies that never complain. You need to take more care.”

Pfaff blames the British psyche for many of the chronic injuries he found among Britain’s athletes. “The British want to tough it out, to grit their teeth and keep going. It doesn’t work well that way,” he said.

Yamauchi has not put in the years of running Radcliffe has. She took a five year break while serving in Tokyo, learning Japanese and marrying her Japanese husband. She did not run a marathon until she was 31, two years after Radcliffe set her world record.

She calls Radcliffe “an amazing role model and trail-blazer” but Radcliffe is a classic example of the British syndrome Pfaff speaks of. She was short-odds favourite to win Olympic gold in Athens, carried an injury, gritted her teeth and failed to finish. Again she went into the 2008 Games again with an injury, finishing 23rd, while Yamauchi equalled the best ever performance by a British woman in sixth place.

Yamauchi’s turn to not take her injuries seriously came after winning the Osaka marathon and running the second fastest time by a Briton of 2:23:12 in London.

Now Yamauchi is on a “maintenance programme” Pfaff and his team control according to texts she sends them daily rating her mood, her sleep, her nutrition and her running. “It’s unrealistic to expect a clear run to the Olympics at her age if you train as you always have. Some things you thought sacred in your programme have to go,” said Pfaff.

Quality training before quantity, in laymen’s terms. “Vigilence and prudence are the buzz words,” said Pfaff but Yamauchi still believes in her dream of an Olympic medal. She points out that there will be less strength in depth in the Olympics than a big city marathon such as London where she has finished second. Of the world’s 20 fastest women marathoners in 2011, 16 were from Kenya and Ethiopia and only six can run in the Olympics.

“I am not under-estimating it by saying that but all sorts of unexpected things happen in the Olympics. Who would have thought (Constantina) Dita would win in Beijing or Paula would lose in Athens? There is a lot of luck involved in an Olympics. “You can do everything to prepare and still come unstuck.”

Having Pfaff and co. in the pits oiling the works is a help.

Mara Yamauchi has been an ambassador for sports performance brand Asics for six years and wears Gel-Nimbus 13 for high mileage training.

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02 January 2012 11:54 AM

THE New Year brought down the curtain on the awards season. No more looking back to the glories of 2011, its heroes and, contrary to the SPOTY shortlist, its heroines. An Olympic year has begun and the only way to look now is forward.

So to get in with the first list of the new year here is my crib sheet for the non-British names of 2012, those you are possibly not well acquainted with but can expect to hear much of in the coming months, the prospective gold medallists and those who next December will be collecting the awards.

Not all will be totally new to you. Many already are into the veterans’ class but are big fish only in their own small sporting ponds. Kohei Ushimara will be 33 this month. The Japanese has won two Olympic silver medals and three straight world all-round gymnastics titles but is relatively unheralded in Britain.

Liliya Shobukhova has triumphed already in London, winning the 2010 London marathon, and is far more likely than our Paula Radcliffe to win the Olympic marathon gold. At 34 she is in her prime, running the second fastest ever (to Paula) last year.

Then there is Homare Sawa, 33, the top scorer with five goals when Japan won the women’s FIFA World Cup last year where she was voted the best player of the tournament. And Jamie Dwyer, the Australian voted last month for a fifth time as world hockey player of the year.

This, though, I am betting will be a youth Olympics, one that introduces us to a new generation of sporting superstars. Like Missy Franklin, or Melissa as it will say on her Olympic accreditation label. Sweet sixteen and already a winner of three gold medals at the 2011 world swimming championships.

You will not miss her. She is 6ft 1in tall and propels herself with size 13 feet, and her progress during this Olympic cycle has been phenomenal. In 2008, she was 37th in the US Olympic Trials at 100 metres freestyle. A few months ago she set the first world short course record since the ban on high-tech suits.

Another American girl-wonder is Jordyn Wieber, not sixteen herself until the month in which the Olympic Games opens. The schoolgirl from DeWitt in Michigan is the US and world all-round gymnastics champion.

On the football field the man to look out for is Naymar, the new Pele, as the Santos striker has been dubbed in Brazil. Since he was not played in the 2010 World Cup finals, he has made 15 appearances for Brazil and scored eight goals. He wants to remain at home until Brazil hosts the 2014 World Cup but no doubt the likes of Barcelona will be trying to change his mind.

Outstanding on the hockey field among the young will be Matthew Swann, from Queensland who will play alongside Dwyer in the Australian team that will probably start favourites to win. At 21, he was voted hockey’s young world player of the year in 2011.

Look out as well for Deepika Kumari, 17, the daughter of an Indian rickshaw driver who is already a Commonwealth Games champion in archery. And expect to see a lot on your television screens of Kristina Vogel, a German cyclist.

Vogel , six times world junor champion in sprint events, narrowly avoided death in a crash in 2009. She was in a coma for 48 hours, with multiple spinal fractures, a broken jaw, smashed teeth and a collapsed lung. Until recently she was having surgery to remove scarring and repair her teeth.

Yet in the final World Cup of 2011 she won the sprint, and many in her sport see her as the future of track cycling’s most explosive power event.

If it happens for her in London, with a story like her’s to tell, no further introductions will be necessary this time next year.